Monday, November 29, 2010

Sea of Chaos

Its been a long time (almost 9 months!) and life has been pretty crazy. Since March I have been working At DoubleTap Games on a game that just came out today. It was a wild ride and I grew so much from it. The game may not be my cup of tea, but I am proud of what we were able to accomplish with the small amount of time and resources we had. That game was "Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos".

The game released today for PS3, XBOX 360 and Wii. Our studio developed the game for all three consoles at the same time. We also did most of the tech for the platforms ourself, so I got to play with all three at a low level. Since this was a three console release with a small team (less than ten people on average) and an 8 month development cycle you can imagine that it was kinda crazy. Nine months of radio silence should tell you something :-D.

Towards the end I was bouncing from issue to issue across three different platforms so my station started to look like Megadesk.

MEGADESK!

This was the first console game I worked on. There is so many different things I implemented for this game I don't even know where to start. The most time was probably spent on implementing all the platform specific features and requirements. Trophies, achievements, player presence, video playback, disc eject, device removal, corrupt data and etc. The list really goes on and on.

Another big thing I worked on was the advanced rendering for the PS3 and XBOX 360 platforms. By "advanced" I mean more then what we did for the Wii. Things like a basic shader pipeline for lighting, multi-texturing (bump, specular, etc.) and full screen pixel shading (blur and etc.). I also made improvements to the water rendering code that was started by another developer. This was really the first time I did rendering development outside of fixed function (yes I know, its about time). Last time I really worked on rendering code was at a company that only really did 2D titles on hardware that didn't have a shader model.

On top of all the engine work I also did my fair share of game programming. I did the patch and set mini-games along with a bunch of misc. gameplay improvements throughout. If there is one area I wish I had more time to work on it would be the gameplay and user interface part of the game. Working on engine and tools is very rewarding to me, but nothing is more rewarding then working on something that directly affects the player's satisfaction with the game.

I haven't touched the game's code in about a month now and it has been nice to get back to a normal work week. I wish I could write more about what I'm doing now, but of course that isn't possible :-(. Here is to maybe seeing more text around here. Stay Tuned!